In 2020, Michael Jordan and Denny Hamlin collaborated to bring together the best of the two worlds. Their brainchild, 23XI Racing, was a product of MJ’s desire to be a part of a championship-winning team in NASCAR. Denny, on the other hand, had already made it big in the sport by then and was ready to take the next step toward ownership.

A partnership formed on a golf course, 23XI Racing, has steadily gone from strength to strength. But to date, they are missing the X-factor needed to win a Cup Series title. Co-owner Hamlin speaks about the team’s goals and reveals one thing that forced him to dissociate 23XI from his long-time employer Joe Gibbs in their deal.

“It takes time”: Denny Hamlin on transforming 23XI Racing into a NASCAR superpower

Building something from scratch is a massive challenge for anyone. Denny and MJ face something similar in their pursuit of making their team a powerhouse in the Cup. Being a new team, there was a lot of skepticism around 23XI. Questions were asked about their potential to succeed and the extent of success they could manage. Addressing the same, after three years of their inception, Hamlin cleared the air on his podcast, ‘Actions Detrimental’.

“When I talked about building 23XI, I said it was going to take a 5-year plan to make us a championship-contending organization,” revealed the 42-year-old.

“We’re in year three now, I still believe that that’s the trajectory. Obviously, we know we’ve gotta get better. We got fast enough cars. But we know where we have to get better, but it’s a process. You can’t just pick crew guys right off the couch, cause if they’re good they’d have a job somewhere right? The process then of you know, fixing if someone’s got health issues and just isn’t 100 percent as a pit crew guy or they need to hone their skills, get more reps like that is a process. That is just weighing like what is this person’s ceiling versus what are they at now.”

Winning a championship as a new owner might be more difficult than winning the championship as a new driver. From being answerable for the actions of drivers and crew members, to organizing the operations of the team, funding it, and taking the project to sponsors, team owners have a tough time working things out. One of the critical aspects of being a successful franchise in NASCAR is maintaining a solid pit crew.

“When you’re building a pit crew department and this is the first year that 23XI’s had their own pit crews,” continues Denny.

Revealing the reason why their deal with JGR didn’t work out, he said, “Do we expand? Do we get more personnel, do we hire more to have 3 pit crews and outsource to another team to let us continue to build our roster and hone our stuff? We figured at Gibbs that we would probably get the fifth or sixth-best team. That just made sense for Gibbs, but it didn’t make sense for us because we have race-winning cars. But it is a process. It takes time.”

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Hamlin opens up on taking risks as a team owner

If anything, 23XI is one of the most well-marketed teams in the sport. With time, they have managed to rope in major sponsors like McDonald’s, Monster Energy, and DoorDash, among many more notable names. A young crop of talented drivers like Bubba Wallace and Tyler Reddick and plans of bringing in names like former 24 Hours of Le Mans winner Kamui Kobayashi have only strengthened their case.

On being asked about how the 23XI Racing pit crew could take shape in the future, Denny disclosed some details about their partnership with JGR, saying, “I mean our alliance with JGR, we use their facilities basically. You know, we hire our own coach, we’ve got ten guys, we don’t have any reserves. What we did is we as a part of our alliance have access to the reserves on JGR’s roster.”

Discussing the recruitment process of the aforementioned members, Hamlin adds, “Some of them were already on 23XI’s cars but they were JGR employees. I would say most of them came from other teams, just you know, other pit crew members’ contracts were up and they come talk and say ‘Hey, I’m interested in coming over to 23XI’. Then we take and we have all the information to try these guys out or look at their history and say is this somebody we wanna hire or not. Again it’s a huge expense for 23XI to hire another pit crew that’s not for one of our cars but it’s like, ‘is the investment worth it?’

Well, taking a gamble is the ebb and flow of being a team owner. In his three years of experience as an executive, Denny Hamlin has learned from some mistakes and capitalized on many fronts as well. For now, the team looks set on the course to becoming what they are aiming for.

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